>>PREVIEW
ANITA RAU BADAMI
Thursday, October 12
Vertigo Playhouse (Tower Centre)
Sunday, October 15
Rolston Recital Hall (The Banff Centre)
The first time I drove through Surrey, B.C., some four or five years ago, I was astonished by the prominent Sikh community: men in colourful turbans congregating in nearby parks and larger-than-life homes, cloned street after street. Accommodating, I was told, relatives near and far. Every year since, I have driven through this community and always wonder: Who are they? Where did they come from? What’s their story? And what are those men talking about in the park?
I found the answers in Anita Rau Badami’s latest novel Can you Hear the Nightbird Call? (Knopf Canada, 432 pp.).
Reading it was like an open invitation to one of those ostentatious homes in Surrey. I was able to meet several generations of Sikh immigrants, hear about the struggles and grief they experienced along the way and their perception of "goras" (a term that literally means "white" people).
Nightbird follows the lives of three women and their families across 50 years and two continents and revolves around three distinct events: the partition of India in 1947, Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 and the explosion of Air India flight 182 in 1985. "I had started the book years ago," says Badami. "I was in India on my second honeymoon when Indira Gandhi was assassinated. There was chaos everywhere and Delhi was like a war zone, fires everywhere. Our flights were cancelled and we were stuck. Every morning we would hear about the murders and the killings."
The novel is mostly set in Vancouver and Delhi, shifting back and forth over time and between both continents, witnessing violence, grief, love and hatred. "I wanted to write about immigrants who carry their past on their backs, which ends up destroying them," says Badami. "I found it curious that people can leave a country and start their life all over again and still remain so tied to the past."
Badami was also compelled to write the story because of the brutality and terror she witnessed in Delhi in 1984. "I saw a fellow burned alive. I will never get rid of that memory and the feelings of horror and sadness that surrounded those events. I didn’t know how much to put on the page, but realized that I couldn’t distance myself. So I had to write it as I saw it. To do anything less would be an injustice to the people and the tragedies that I saw," she says.
When Badami moved to Vancouver in 1995, she developed friendships in both Indo and Sikh communities, and had friends who were willing to talk and share their experiences. Once again, she witnessed first-hand the tensions between the two groups, the Indo-Canadian and Sikh-Canadian communities, living in Vancouver. "The tension was so high that they were close to violence," she says.
Reading Nightbird is a true cultural experience. Badami’s prose is simple yet elegant, evocative and engaging. Perfumes of coriander and curries, jingling bangles and colourful silks jump out from each page. But the core of the book touches on the common human experience of loss, pain and death, which goes beyond cultural boundaries. It humanizes the horrible tragedies experienced by the Sikh families and evokes a sense of loss and grief in the reader that transforms these events into tragedies for everyone, not just the communities directly involved.
"I wanted to give readers some insight into the lives of these people, which for the most part, nobody knows about. I hope it will move people as much as it moved me to write it," says Badami.
Badami completed the first draft of the book several years ago. It focused primarily on Air India flight 182’s tragedy, but just as Badami was ready to publish, Air India’s case went to trial. "I had to rewrite the whole thing because after the trial came out, events that I had imagined in the first draft didn’t coincide with the facts," says Badami. "It was so discouraging. I had to scrap the book and start all over again, but I’m glad I did."
Can you Hear the Nightbird Call? took Badami six years to write. "I thought that I would never write another book after I finished this one. But I started writing a new novel just four days ago." She won’t say anything more, only that the next novel will take place entirely in Canada. |
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